While there will be the typical reports of Black Friday shopping surges on Seattle, Spokane and Portland news broadcasts, its not likely anyone will trump the tale out of San Antonio Friday morning, where an armed shopper discouraged a line-jumping thug who pushed and punched his way into a store.

According to the NBC affiliate in Dallas, the unidentified shopper in San Antonio will not be charged after drawing his legally-carried handgun. He had just been punched in the face, and other shoppers at a Sears store were pushed and otherwise harassed by the line-jumper. When the gun came out, the thug ducked for cover behind a refrigerator and then fled.

According to the San Antonio Express News, after several minutes shopping got back to normal. When store security arrived, they told reporters to leave. If you cant maintain peace and order, at least dont let the press talk about anarchy.

I caught part of a news brief yesterday that said a consumer group had checked prices in early October and compared them with now. They found that many stores had actually marked highly sought items like TVs and appliances UP in confidence that people are conditioned to shop Black Friday assuming they are saving, without looking.

I don’t know if one of those extremely crowded “Black Friday” lines is the best place to be pulling out your weapon. It would have to be ABSOLUTELY necessary. Imagine if another weapon comes out among those people and shots are fired? MANY people could be seriously injured or die, only because the bad situation was escalated into something worse. I think I only pull a weapon in that scenario if it is to STOP someone who is already looking to inflict that kind of harm.

I’m not sure some punk roughing up people for cheap flat panel TVs meets the bar.

The Standard Distribution (bell shaped) curve is a marvelous tool. If you had a class of 30 geniuses, it would tell you that statistically, half of the geniuses would be above average geniuses, and half below average geniuses. The same if you had a class of 30 dimwits. Half would be above average dimwits, and the other half below average dimwits.

I mention this because you can apply the SD curve to the entire population of the United States. For example, it would reveal that *half* of the people have below average mental health.

This really rings true, when you consider what the mental health of an “average” American actually is. Half of us are worse than that!

If you assign letter grades to mental health, the SD curve goes even further. It would tell you that 17% of Americans rate a ‘D’ or lower in their mental health, and about 5% of all Americans rate an ‘F’.

1 in 20 Americans rates an ‘F’ in their mental health.

This sounds like a great justification for carrying guns, if you are a ‘C’, a ‘B’, or an ‘A’.

And it doesn’t even count those criminals, the majority, who are mentally sound. All the more reason to be armed.

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